An enjoyable basketball book even for those who aren’t hoops aficionados.
In Brundage’s novel, a 21-year-old basketball player earns success and learns valuable life lessons.
DJ Joyner is a college basketball phenomenon as a point guard but not good enough for the NBA draft. He then competes in the NBA’s Summer League, playing for the Washington Wizards and hoping for a permanent spot. He hangs on and succeeds, but his position on the team is still precarious. Then a mystery man shows up who goes by the name Marion Lake; he’s also known as The Invisible Hand—a basketball trainer with a legendary reputation. Someone equally mysterious has sponsored DJ, paying Lake’s fees, and the training regimen becomes truly brutal. DJ is willing to let his training consume him, even to the point where it threatens his relationship with WNBA player Shanice Barton. His determination pays off: DJ was good, but now he’s better. Success follows success, and it becomes clear that someday he, too, may be someone’s mysterious benefactor—and a superstar. This is an unabashedly heartwarming story. Brundage is a former basketball player himself and is now a successful motivational speaker and the author of the self-help book Shoot Your Shot (2018). This novel is clearly meant to illustrate his motivational philosophy, with passages such as “He had allowed envy and his wounded ego to dictate his actions, fogging his outlook,” but it does make for a feel-good read. Those who follow basketball may be more familiar with the technical basketball terminology and jargon than nonfans will be, but the author often provides helpful context. Still, the prose is often infused with sportswriting overkill, as when a basketball is said to have “voyaged to the hoop” or “the rotating sphere descended to the rim.” On the other hand, Brundage has a gift for describing the second-by-second drama of gameplay; he knows how to get readers on the edges of their (stadium) seats as the game clock relentlessly ticks down and players execute split-second plays.
An enjoyable basketball book even for those who aren’t hoops aficionados.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798987956007
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Green Hill Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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